The Villains

Hi everyone! :)

I must say I wanted to wait a bit more before presenting what's new in Valyria Tear, but since a lot of time already flew away, I'll do a quick piece of news now!

First things first, let's start with a small teaser ;)

Let me introduce the great first Villain you'll encounter in the game. The mysterious and malevolent Country Lord Banesore.

In the development version, the story goes to the point where Bronann meets that bad guy. As it was the heaviest thing so far I had to script/prepare sprites for, I'm quite happy it's more or less done. :D

I'll now be able to focus on adding the next part of the story, which is a bit lighter in term of scripting and should also be more interesting for the people in need of action! ;)

- Passive Status effect and elements

But this is not only what happened last month, IkarusDowned added support for passive equipment effects in battles, meaning that you will now be able to use (future) upgraded swords and other equipment pieces, giving bonus in attack, or defense.

The status/party, the shop mode, and the menu equipment windows have been upgraded to properly show different equipment effects in a common fashion, and with icons, which will tell the link between stats and effects:

The omni-sword, a piece of equipment used to test the extreme display case.

- Other improvements

The game will now remember which repeatable dialogues you have seen and show a bubble only on new npc dialogues. This will be a great help to get to know whom you talked with.

Common game data are now loaded once instead of loading them each time a game mode was loaded, which leads to less audio crashes and better overall performance!

I also took the time to properly try and fix joystick support. Valyria Tear should now be fully playable using your favourite pad!

- Save data and OSX ports

Valyria Tear will now use standard paths for settings and save files, for both Windows and Linux, and auto-copy the data which was in the old location.

Also, thanks to Socapex's work, OSX support for Snow Leopard, Lion and Mountain Lion has been upgraded and improved, and test builds are available in the downloads section! :D

Small Bugfix release

Hi all,

Following a nice reminder by Ablu, I uploaded a bugfix release of the Half-Episode I release aka 0.5.1.
You will find it in the download section.

The only change is a fix in the shop mode, preventing a crash when buying in certain cases.

Be sure to get this version if you're in the middle of it :)

Best Regards,

Return to the village

Hi everyone, :)

Here is a little summary of what has been done last month in Valyria Tear:

First of all, let me thank Brian Callahan for porting Valyria Tear to OpenBSD (See the download page) and helping me to adapt back my own code for that. :)

Now, let's start with the two major features developed by IkarusDowned and Codergreen which are basically finished and have been merged in the master branch. This means Valyria Tear now has minimap and trade support! :D

The minimaps are auto-generated from map data, making them seamless when designing maps (yeah), additional features, like displaying map exits, or interesting spots will likely happen a bit later but it's already very great to see it in full use. So, I thank again very warmly Ikarus for this feature. :)

at night at the forest entrance, with a minimap ;)

Trading support will also help the gaming experience as a key point, since it will permit me to propose improvement to equipment against special materials, sell rare wares with special conditions, among other things, so that the player will later be able to tune up his/her equipment for the next dungeon!

Trading support, with the additional required items to get the stuff!

You may have noticed the forest entrance is displayed at night, as I indeed added the story part where the characters goes back to the village while night falls dynamically on your return. I intentionally stopped the game before the actual arrival to the village as the village content is sill WIP at the moment. More in the next piece of news! (Sorry Shirish ;]). Still, here is a small teaser:

Soldiers!

- Other little things

You might have noticed that I added a nameplate under the name of character, which should help with the name readability. The idea isn't mine as it was simply disabled code from Allacrost missing the needed graphics but still this is refreshing. :)

The battles also have a new stamina bar (seen on the right when fighting) and several other small tweaks have been made in the same trend.

- Contextual and c-format strings translation support

In the other area of the game, I added contextual translation support and c-formatted strings (i.e.: "Paul has %u Drunes."), both permitting to help translators in their hard work, based on their requests.

- Balancing

McMic and BioHazardX also requested to get the first new skills a little bit earlier in game and talked about the enemy experience points rewards in general, leading to a global rescale of enemy XP, and Drunes (gold). In order to stay relevant and fair, I made a spreadsheet giving me hints on how much XP and drunes a monster was worth based on its stats, weakness, items and skills, and used that as a base to rescale everything.
The result isn't a spectacular change as it only led to tweaks here and there to those values. The most noticeable change was a fix to the mistake in the HP of the Fenrir second encounter.
I thank everyone for their polite and sensible feedback on those points.

- Performance

The fading system was also simplified to no longer apply a color on each and every image on every draw calls and use an overlay instead. This has simplified the draw code for the images and other elements of this kind and should lead to a slight but welcome increase in performance. I, myself, have no longer slow downs in the shop mode (why not?) and while fading in and out. :)

- Map data format

Another key work was also done on map data :
The map tile data and the map scripts are now two separate files. This has several advantages:
- The map load time has decreased in general.
- The map data is reusable and is reused when returning to the village without the need to twist the village center script even more.
- This permits also to remove the max length cap the scripts could have as the map editor would then no longer load the map file after reaching that cap.

This move has also got another goal. I'm currently planning to remove the use of a setenv() function in the map data script and simply use a normal table, and drop context switching support, as this (even strong) feature is only used once and isn't very friendly in term of data handling. This can later be readded  with the support of loading several map data files at the same time, but I'll sincerely go without, for now, if at all.

Why all that? Because I'll then be able to start working on creating a tiled plugin and use Tiled as the Valyria Tear map editor, and this, for obvious reasons due to the fantastic maturity of this open source tool. :)

Thanks a lot for reading!

OSX test packages!

Hi all,

As Socapex said it, happened to own a mac, willing to have a go at testing Valyria?

A testing package for Mountain Lion has been made here:

http://forum.freegamedev.net/viewtopic.php?f=76&t=4232

And soon for Snow Leopard!

A big thanks to him for doing that uneasy job.

Have fun!

Full Episode I dev started

Hi all, :)

Almost twenty days have followed the first finished Valyria Tear release, and here is what happened since then:

The main feature I have been working on for almost two weeks was the separation of the weapon layer from the main characters layer, making it possible to display a custom weapon animation corresponding to the current character's equipment! And I'm happy to say this is now true at least for the battle mode. :)

Another key point I wanted to see done before moving on was the ability to setup a scripted death sequence for battle enemies. It went along much more nicely than I thought and it's now a reality:

Bronann handling his wood sword, and the boss dying in a custom way...

And, this is not everything we made:

Key items can now be weapons, equipment or everything else as the "Key" flag of key items is now a simple tag, and not a item type anymore, permitting me to clearly set the characters starting equipment as key items, and make it visible in the menu window.

I also made physical objects support scriptable event triggering when "talking" to them, and this permitted me for instance, to make Olivia's cat meow or Lilly's dog bark, as many people were requesting this ;) , but it will also permit me to add hidden switches, and so on...

Something that was quite requested also, is the fact to be able to select the language at first run. This is now done and the game will prompt the language menu and accept common keys to select it before displaying the help window in the right language, making new players much more at ease from the start.

And of course, I started to script the next part of the story, finishing the after crystal appearance scene, and preparing the return to village phase. More to come on it, for sure. ;)

Last but not least, Ikarus also made his part of work by being in the finals of preparing new dungeons minimap support:

New WIP minimap support by IkarusDowned :)

Stay tuned!

Final release of Half-Episode I

Hi all,

The first Valyria Tear release of half the episode I has reached its final state!
Note: The windows installer and the Linux source package should be available in a few hours. The packages are ready!! Enjoy!

And here is what has been done since the last release candidate (aka RC2):

First of, the game is using new musics in battles and in the caves area, permitting to give back to Allacrost by letting it breath with its own musical mood. I hope you'll enjoy the new music as I did play with the new ones for several days to make sure of the replacement.
A big and never-ending thanks to OpenGameArt.org as the many quality and free contributions there made this step rather easy, for that change, but also for everything linked to open sourced art in general.

I'm also taking the opportunity to thank again the quality while fast-paced work of IkarusDowned, who simply finished the quest log, which is looking quite useable now:

New Quest Log, now with completion text and location images of the quest start

He also worked on the beginning of a map (and minimap!) support in game, and the world map is already a very usable feature, see for yourself:

The current WIP World Map, entirely configurable :)

Let's not forget the work of Codergreen who actually reached a milestone in the refresh of the shop mode. The new shop is now much simpler to use and quicker to get stuff from or sell to, and I thank him warmly for that.

Simply select the item you want to buy/sell, use the left or right key to add/remove, confirm and you're done.

Trade support is also on the roll and should be ready for the next release!

The new code should also be lighter, both in readability and in performance, as it seemingly was for me:

The new shop! from Codergreen

As for the misc things, many, many smaller things have made their way through and were added or fixed for this latest release, I'm taking the opportunity to thanks Shirish (among many others) for the thorough playtests he's done and the bugs reported:

- Many optimizations, removal of global variables, in lua scripts.

- Made the engine able to drop a global table before reinserting data in it, thus preventing the read of outdated data and preventing potential crashes and the loading of invalid save data.

- Addition of missing dialogues where the players consensus found relevant.

- Refactor and cleanup in the settings code, also adding the missing joystick keys, removing unused ones in the options:

New joystick options

I also thank NaN and BioHazard for their feedback and their continuous translation updates.

And finally Roots, for his will to keep collaborating with us, while struggling to bring Allacrost in a more and more interesting and enjoyable state. :) You might soon have the possibility to play two RPGs instead of one!

Now that this episode part is done and in feature freeze, the next version of Valyria Tear will feature what's next in the story, along with many new features!

Stay tuned!

Release Candidate 2

Hi everyone,

After a lot of work, the release candidate 2 of our first release is here and can be downloaded here.

This time, I provided both a windows installer, and a linux source package, fully tested against official packaging rules thanks the marvelous help of Ablu. :)

What changed since the previous pre-release?

In short:
- Addition of the actual introduction of the game.
- Quest log in the menu thanks to IkarusDowned.
- New reorganized battle command menu.
- Many new graphics and small updates in the maps.
- Translation of the all dialogues and the main GUI options in every available languages (German, Italian, English and French) thanks to the help of BioHazardX and NaN.
- Simplified and more interactive first battle tutorial dialogue.
- Made the linux source installable and thus packageable.
- Many, many other bug fixes.

We also tried to answer all the feedback received on the forums and by other means and tweaked many things based on that, even if certain are still pending.

Also, a Mac port requested!! If you're a mac developer, and willing to help on that part, I couldn't be more happy, feel free to get in touch. :)

Stay tuned!